I come bearing pictures! One of those fashion self-portraiture bits that I’m constantly trying to wrangle people into helping me with (one day, I will get a remote. One day. That day may well be soon). For this shoot, I collaborated with make-up artist Kiran Kaur, who did a lovely job of making me look good and complementing the earthy tones of the first two pieces — the green cowl and burnt orange hat — and then adding a little bit of pink to my look for the blue and purple hats. She also touched up my hair and assisted me with the photography.

This was my first shoot after moving from Hampstead Heath to Belsize Park — it was the day after I moved, actually, so I wasn’t really familiar with the area yet. We got ready at my now-regular Starbucks, shot on my street and another one nearby, and touched up my makeup between shots at the little table outside the Springhealth gym. I’ve still got another two pieces to shoot, and I’ll post some behind-the-scenes pics along with those when I’ve got them.

Meanwhile, I wanted to show you these. If you love the hats and cowls as much as I do, head on over to pixiebell.etsy.com! The quality and craftsmanship are amazing. I actually had my mom include my dragonslayer hat in my coat parcel because I missed it so much.

I have this admittedly ridiculous problem where I don’t like parties, but I love to dress up. Cosplay is obviously the best option, but costumes and cons are expensive, which is why closet cosplay is always on my mind — dressing up in your day-to-day life using items that you can wear in the rest of your day-to-day life is a winner in both my heart and my budget.

But sometimes it’s fun to really, properly dress up, and I like that modeling allows me to do that. In that spirit, a while back, I was sent a witch costume — a tiny colorful witch costume with a Playboy logo on the ribcage. I’m not much for sexy Halloween costumes because they don’t remind me of anything, and like I said, I’m into cosplay — and what I like about that is portraying characters, not generic archetypes. Generic archetypes bore me to tears.

But I saw this costume and I immediately thought of two things:

Bubble Witch Saga, the kids version

Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the cartoon version

Plenty of reason to play around with it, right?

It got a bit cold before I was able to get the shoot I really wanted in, but I did have a shoot with photographer Darren M Gomes one night in Hampstead/Hampstead Heath, and we did get some cool shots!

Back in August, my friend (I think I can call her a friend by now) Bethany Owen organized a little pinup and swimwear shoot on her inlaws’ boat on the Thames. It was a long, grueling day and also really, really fun because working with someone you get along with and who cares about how you feel is great. Obviously. But modeling for money can be severely lacking in the latter, which I’ll go into further in a couple of other posts I’ve got planned — one about modeling in general, and a follow-up to this one, because Bethany and I got a lot of pictures besides the ones the photographer took (I think she actually enjoyed herself after the first couple of times I arranged all the manual settings and handed her the camera!), and because I want to do that little ‘what you don’t see in the pictures’ blurb on all my modeling shoots, just like I did when I posted my bridal shoot photos from Pagli Rajkonna.

But today I am very busy and did not have a post scheduled, so I thought I’d begin by sharing these.

Oh Sunny Sunny Day

You may recognize this outfit and a couple of the shots from the sewing machine giveaway I ran back in early August. I said the outfit post would show up the week after — my bad. But it’s here now! This is the one-size (plus-size one-size? So says the listing, but I gave my size rather than purchasing it straight out, so I don’t think it was my fault!) tunic I held together with bobby pins. I really love how the skirt looks in particular — the white net detail isn’t super noticeable in the product photos, and bunching it together around my tiny hips makes it stand out. It’s a fun touch.

I shot these with Christine Cherry in the garden of Keats House. It was my first shoot there of a few that will show up on the blog over the course of the next month. I still haven’t gone inside the actual house, and now that it’s within walking distance but not basically on my doorstep anymore, I… am actually more interested in doing that. One day!

Right now I’ve got a lot of work to do and a new room to adapt to. I forgot it always takes me a good half week at minimum to get used to a new place. Today is my first day properly working at my desk, and I got my landlady to switch out the chair that was here for an office chair of her daughter’s, who just moved out, and I’m starting to feel truly, genuinely, the-kind-that-leads-to-productivity-and-reduced-stress comfortable. I’m a little overwhelmed by pending work, but every now and again a little ray of optimism peeks through. It’s lovely. You’re going to see a lot more of me and my work and my writing from now on. Hope you’re ready! ;)

A few weeks ago I had the chance to work with a fellow portrait photographer, Christine Cherry, and had a blast doing a bit of modeling for her — frankly my favorite modeling thing to date, and it was my first and I didn’t get paid for it. Not sure where everything went wrong. Men, probably.

One of the things we shot was this outfit featuring a gorgeous red maxi dress from New Look. The sunglasses were Christine’s idea, and I found myself more comfortable wearing them than I expected. The dress was a soft, light cotton and really comfortable, too. I’m still weird about maxi dresses, but in terms of comfort I’d definitely choose this one over the blue paisley one, even though I think the blue one is slightly prettier. But I don’t have to choose (unless I decide to get rid of one of them to make room in my luggage… let’s just not talk about moving, I already would quite like to crawl into a hole and die), so hey. ;)

Last month, I got a beautiful tunic from Joe Browns. It is gorgeous, and I gave them my size, and it came in… and it was massive, and labeled “one size.” Well, one size on non-stretchy linen means I looked like I was wearing a sack. One made with nice linen fabric, but a sack nonetheless!

Still, I don’t back out of a product review, and I had a shoot planned with the lovely Christine Cherry, so I decided to wear the tunic — but maybe pin it to my body a bit. With bobby pins, because I’m resourceful and it wasn’t supposed to bear too much movement.

I have to say I absolutely love what I did.

It turns out it makes an incredible, amazing, ridiculously freaking gorgeous flapper dress! And I can’t sew it in place because I don’t have a sewing machine, and it would be a terrible idea to get one when I’m not settled yet with a long-term lease and I’m moving in the middle of August again to begin with. But if I could — oh, I so would.

(Full outfit post coming next week!)

Since I can’t have the sewing machine, though, the lovely people at Hobby Craft told me I could give one away to my readers! Since I know plenty of you love to sew, many for your shops or blogs, I thought that was a truly fantastic idea.

The sewing machine Hobby Craft is giving away is a Janome Sew Mini 140M. It only weighs 2.5 kg, so it’s perfect if you don’t have a lot of space or don’t want to haul a huge dead weight every time you need to put it up on a table. (Not speaking from experience or anything…) It has a range of preset stitching options, widths and lengths, including zigzag stitching.

Giveaway is open to UK residents only, but I know there are a few of you around and hey — I’m a freelance photographer and model, so what better way to network with potential clients than offer them a free sewing machine in exchange for following and sharing my work? Never say I’m not transparent. And hey, if you’re in London, maybe you could fix up that tunic for me. ;)

If you need something heavier duty, or simply don’t win this sewing machine giveaway, I recommend having a look at all the sewing machines Hobby Craft carries — there’s something for everyone there, and an awesome range of prices to fit any pocket!

As this post reaches your screens, I am probably on a plane, catching up on design work or writing or snapping photos out the window. Or I may be napping, seeing as I had to catch a train at 6:45 AM and I didn’t bother with the whole night sleep thing. I took these pictures with my mom as my assistant last Thursday; hope you like!

Do I or do I not look like a neurotic modern-day Greek goddess? Because I love it. Mighty Aphrodite is a Woody Allen movie I love that occasionally has a Greek chorus pop up to talk about the story, and my mind went straight to it when I looked back at the shots of my face. (My feelings on Woody Allen can be summed up like so: love his work + he should never work again and should probably go to jail. Somehow one does not affect the other, which is unusual for me, but I guess his work speaks to me that much.)

There’s a lot of Canada here. The necklace, the dress-worn-as-top and the crown all come from independent Canadian designers who have Etsy storefronts. The ring and the earrings come from jewelry makers in California and Arizona respectively. The shoes and jeans I bought locally, the glasses came from England, and the socks I bought in England — no idea where each of those was manufactured, though.

I took this at the park (full of graffiti, by the way; thanks for ruining my flower ceiling shots, assholes) that covers the distance between a supermarket in the outer part of my city and the train station. Went to get a train ticket to Madrid for Monday and look at suitcases — though I didn’t like what they had in stock and ended up buying the suitcase I saw in a store smack in the middle of town on Tuesday. Actually wore that leather jacket on top of the dress this time, too, because it was cold, and a bag I handed off to my mom because I’m down to two bags that are both not broken and big enough to hold my DSLR, and neither of them went with this outfit.

The dark side of fashion blogging, here on A Classic Notion! Transparency: 1; aura of mystery: 0. Greek goddess regardless.

I am half agony, half hope

Phew. Haven’t done an outfit post in a while, mainly because I don’t go out much and if I don’t go out, I go for comfortable and boring over photographable. But on Tuesday I was out of clean comfortable clothes, put on a dress, shaved my legs, realized I was freezing, and changed into a pair of jeans my sister handed down to me because she didn’t like them anymore. Or something. Maybe her ass got too big? Of all the skinny jeans I’ve tried on — which admittedly haven’t been many — these are by far the most skintight, and compared to my sister, I am a stick.

I’m actually really happy with how this all turned out. I was surprisingly comfortable in my skin — I felt good in the outfit and I felt good in the clothes themselves — and I feel like all I’ve learned in the past several months shows in these photos. Some are a little overexposed because I only did the one lighting test with my mom as a model and the sun kept coming and going, but I’m very, very pleased.